Not long ago, Iraqi native Khawla Elia was at the peak of
her professional career. As the secretary general of Catholic Relief Serivces partner agency Caritas
Iraq, the buck stopped at her desk. She was responsible for everything, from
hiring the right people to supervising the programs that helped thousands of
Iraqis forced to flee their homes after the 2003 invasion.

"I barely had enough time to scratch my head," says
the effervescent Khawla. "Life at work was very full and rewarding."
She and her husband, a math teacher in Iraq for 28 years, were proudly raising
their two sons in a neighborhood not too far from her extended family in
Baghdad.

Not an Easy Choice

Everything changed in 2006, when sectarian violence erupted
in Iraq, leading to a threat of civil war.

"It was hard to believe the violence—just like a
volcano that suddenly erupted," she says. "People were running up and
down the streets with their machine guns. Someone even fired a bullet at our
house, just for fun."

"We endured it for as long as we could," she adds,
"but when our fellow Iraqis started threatening us just for being
Christians, we couldn't take it anymore."

Suddenly, she says, they were treated as intruders in their
homeland. "They called us dirty because we were Christians," says
Khawla. "They used to call my boys horrible names just for being the sons
of a Christian woman."

The name-calling quickly escalated to harassment in the form
of a letter threatening the family because they are Catholics. "I knew
from experience that people were kidnapped—even killed—because of their
religion," says Khawla. "We knew then that we could no longer live
safely in our beloved homeland."

It wasn't an easy choice for Khawla or her family. She spoke
proudly of being an Iraqi, of spending her entire childhood in Iraq, of meeting
and marrying her husband there and thinking that, someday, she'd enjoy her
grandchildren in the country where she was born and raised.

As she and her family were packing their car to flee the
country, someone approached her son and said, "What are you still doing
here? Didn't we tell you to leave?" They hit her son with a gun, and, as
he lay bleeding on the ground, Khawla remembers crying uncontrollably. "No
one would come help me. It was as though the rest of the neighbors were just
too afraid to come out of their house and help us." The family fled to
Syria, where they've lived as refugees ever since.

A Show of Solidarity

"CRS has helped me a great deal since I came to Syria,"
says Khawla. "My colleagues from CRS kept in touch with me, offering to
help in whatever way they could. They made me feel that I'm still remembered by
someone."

"We have no one here; no one asks about us, no one
really cares about us here—except for my friends from CRS," she adds. "They
have done so much to help me psychologically. I can't even tell you how good
that feels to be remembered."

Khawla and her family have applied for resettlement to the
United States, a long, drawn-out process that can take years. For most Iraqi
refugees, it's a long shot. In the meantime, neither she nor her husband can
work in Syria, where the unemployment rate hovers around 30 percent. And like
most Iraqi refugees who have fled to other countries, her family is running out
of money.

"We're living in a crisis now, but we're hopeful things
will get better for us. We have hope, and we believe in God. It's the only way
we can get through the day."

Liz O'Neill is CRS' communications officer for Europe, the Middle East and Asia. She is based at the agency's headquarters in Baltimore.